Can I get away with running Ubuntu without a swap partition?

MikeHunt79 · 24 Feb 2010 at 13:17

As I can only have 4 partitions on my drive, and I've already got 3 other partitions excluding the HFS Ubuntu partition.

I'm running a 1.6GHz Atom with 1.5GB of ram... So not exactly a screamer!

The Installer said it was 'not recommended'... Exactly how important is a swap partition?

MikeHunt79 · 24 Feb 2010 at 16:41

Thanks, I think it should be ok. I'm not planing on doing too much heavy multitasking, and I'll try and disable unneeded services and various things like that.

If I do run out of RAM, will I get a warning message about it or will things crash and go horribly wrong... Or has anyone yet to do this?

MikeHunt79 · 25 Feb 2010 at 19:47

Thanks all, I'm running it right now with no swap and all seems good.

I don't really do any gaming under Linux, I boot into Windows for that.

I mainly just do browsing and some casual coding under Ubuntu, so nothing too RAM intensive.

MikeHunt79 · 26 Feb 2010 at 10:48

JonJ678 said:
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but why not make a swap file instead?

I had no idea you could use a swap file. I always assumed Linux needed a dedicated swap partition. But I admit I have not had much experience with Linux.

I'll give a swapfile a go. I'm not short of HD space, only partitions as you are limited to 4 partitions with an MBR style partition system.

BigglesPiP said:
Just pass the warning, it will work.

Thanks for the heads up, I have noticed FF can be a little memory hungry at times. I'm going to give the swap file thingy a go I think.